I hear you want folks to send you any fishy emails they receive about your health care reform plan. So I'm enclosing the ones I've received. I've stripped senders' addresses because I know you have no interest in collecting that kind of info, you just want to correct disinformation. Incidentally, not all the messages diss your plan (whatever the heck it is) but all are pretty fishy. Here goes:

Dear Hobbitses, you don't know me so you may be surprised by my asking you to pay more taxesss. I'm not asking for myself but for our precious Presssident Barack Obama and all the people (like poor Smeagol, gollum gollum) who aren't covered by health insurancess. I know you aren't wealthy hobbitses, so you may be thinking this email isn't meant for you. Think again my precious. Wealth is in the eye of the beholder and we're all beholden to the One Ring. Now on the finger of precious Obama who only wields it to do good. Nice Smeagol serves Obama and get lots of fishess...

From someone who identified themselves as "The Gorton Fisherman":

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All hands on deck! Some bilge swilling swabbies are claiming Cap'n Obama wants to shanghai a hefty hunk of the economy and run the entire health industry from the good ship USS Government. Tis' a load of beer-battered scrod. The Cap'n doesn't want to play doctor and he doesn't want to be a car salesman either. But whenever he tries to get out, taxpayers pull him back in. Cash for clunkers just keeps on clinking. Please, won't you join with me and Mrs. Paul (no relation to Ron Paul) in showing Cap'n Obama we're on board with his health care reform plan? Just make your mark on the linked petition. Trust me. No burly sailors will call, nor will a sack be dropped over your head.

Then there's this brief missive:

Call me Ishmael. I know what it's like to follow a guy with a mad plan into the maw of disaster. And that frickin' white whale wasn't nearly as large as the national deficit.

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Long John Silver was also succinct. (Note to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: Silver uses inflammatory language and seems to advocate violence against public officials.)

Yo ho ho ho and a bottle of rum! Who wants a pack of piss gum missionaries, like the ones that made them Polynesian gals cover their boobies, measurin' how much grog we drink and sayin' no new kidney for you, mate. Arrgggh, run 'em through! That is-- them that survives walkin' the plank!

Jonah ranted at length:

I've lived in the belly of the whale for lo these many years. Seen presidents come and presidents go. Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today/hey hey ho ho Tricky Dick has gotta go-- and so on and so forth through the creepy crawly Clintons and WMD Bush. But damn if Obama doesn't take the little dictator cake. Real iron hand in velvet glove stuff. Demonizing dissent. Covering up torture and grabbing more and more power over how people live. Getting down with corporatism while lip servicing American workers. Funneling public money to a tight little Wall Street clique. What's even more weird than his economic czar, health czar, car czar, for all I--friggin-know-toilet-training-czar, is that most of my fellow belly dwellers, who've questioned authority/authoritarianism for lo these many years, have turned pod. As the wise (tho not Latina) Dr. Miles Bennell screamed at the true ending of Don Siegel's seminal flick, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, YOU'RE NEXT YOU'RE NEXT YOU'RE NEXT. Insert-- first they came for your doctor.

Well Mr. President, the above were the most coherent (though Jonah pushes the envelope) of the fishy emails I received. Others were just too wack to pass along. Including a rambling dissertation from some guy about fishing, freedom, and his need for a hip replacement. He claimed to have been the model for Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea". Which would make him about gazillion years old since that story was written in 1951! In reality "Old Man" is probably some graying Baby Boomer worked up over scare stories about how countries with single payer health care systems make people wait forever for procedures such as hip replacements. I shot back an answer to Old Man, telling him you'd dropped the single payer thing in favor of a system that will merely provide competition for what already exists. And that if your new plan (whatever the heck it is) turns into a wedge for single payer, Old Man won't be around to see it. Given his advanced age and all.

One last fish story. The fishiest of them all. I actually received an email from someone purporting to be the star of "Jaws". No, not Roy Scheider (though that would be fairly fishy since he's dead) or Richard Dreyfuss, but the great white shark himself! Seems "Jaws" objects to what he calls the "hate speech" being used by folks pushing Obamacare. Specifically, all those comparisons of insurance and pharmaceutical companies to sharks. If the language of our national health care conversation isn't changed, Jaws and his kin plan to protest at town hall meetings all over the country. Supposedly, they've already contacted Shamu at Sea World, who's promised to lend them his private jet and travel tank. (Guess killer whales and sharks can form coalitions.) As Jaws puts it "when a bunch of tanked sharks show up at those meetings, they'll make angry mobs in Brooks Brothers duds look like pussycats."

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That's it for now Mr. President. But I'll be sure and send you any other fishy emails that wash up with the tide.

After several years of NYC go-go dancing and wacky radical fun (including a trip to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago) Carola Von H. became a No Wave band leader and Mail Artist. Picking up change as a free lance writer. Her pen ranged (more...)